The average New Yorker has no time to read New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 375-page report, “New York City Preliminary Racial Equity.” As a sociologist who has written extensively on racial issues, and as someone who has worked with racial and ethnic minorities for many years, reading this report was right up my alley.
What I uncovered was disturbing: Mamdani and his administration have a very warped, indeed dangerous, vision of race in America. The document is an extreme left-wing assessment of American history.
The report informs the reader that all of those immigrants who came to New York to seek a better life were wrong to do so. “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation, and racial oppression.” Why the immigrants kept on coming it never explains.
“The land New York City stands on today once belonged to the Lenape people, who were forcibly displaced through settler colonialism.” In fact, the land never “belonged” to the Lenape anymore than it “belongs” to those who live in New York today. The Lenape migrated to New York from the west coast, and their ancestors migrated to North America from Asia. The Indians crossed through Beringia, a land bridge between Asia and America that existed during the ice ages.
The report mentions that Wall Street was home to the slave trade. What it doesn’t mention is the origin of the term “Wall Street.” The Dutch built a wall downtown to protect their colony from Native Americans and the British, both of whom were attacking them.
The language used to describe conditions for the millions who migrated to New York City speaks volumes about the report’s politics. There are 103 mentions of “racism,” 91 of “bias,” 84 of “discrimination,” 24 of “slavery,” 14 of “enslaved,” 9 of “exploitation,” 6 of “oppression” and 5 of “colonization.”
There are two mentions in the entire report of “freedom” and two of “liberty,” and in three of the four citations, they are employed with derision and sarcasm.
It complains a lot about “pay equity.” It offers as an example the fact that whites are overrepresented as CEOs compared to African Americans and Hispanics. It offers no evidence that this outcome was achieved by illegitimate means. Hispanics are overrepresented in the landscaping industry, and as jockeys in the horse racing industry. Is that a problem?
In the real world pay disparities are mostly a function of market forces. Professional athletes, many of whom are black, are multimillionaires, and that is because the demand for sports is great and the revenue that is generated is a function of it.
The report says that “For many years, Black and Hispanic communities in New York City have been overrepresented in its jails.” There is a reason for this: they commit a disproportionate number of crimes. Just as important, they typically mug and kill their own people. But these inconvenient facts are never mentioned.
The report notes with horror “the introduction of punitive policing policies in the 1990s,” such as “stop and frisk,” and that this led to “mass incarceration” of blacks and Hispanics. What it doesn’t say is that these policies were a smashing success.
During the 1990s in New York City, the crime rate fell by more than 40 percent, so much so that the Police Commissioner, Bill Bratton, said “the decline in homicides and other violent crimes between 1990 and 2000 constitutes one of the great achievements in the history of urban America.”
The “stop and frisk” policies continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. Contrary to what the Mamdani report suggests, not only did this not result in an uptick in police brutality, in 2012 the number of civilian complaints was the lowest it had been in the previous five years.
Turning to education, the report wants to eliminate “racial disparities that disproportionately affect Black and Brown learners.” It also wants to ensure that “Children and youth receive a quality public education that prepares them for college and/or career, regardless of zip code.”
Notice that it wants “quality public education,” not quality education. Yet the data show that for decades minorities want the opportunity to send their children to a private school, often a parochial one, yet cannot afford to do so. Mamdani, of course, is opposed to school choice.
It is also untrue to say he wants “quality public education.” The most effective public schools are charter schools, which he would like to crush. Minority parents want them but he won’t buckle. There is no mention of charter schools in the report, just as there is no mention of school choice, school vouchers or parochial schools.
There is also no mention of the high absentee rate among minority students. The report does talk about discipline problems, but not in the way most would think about them. It complains that too many black and Hispanic kids are being disciplined. Would Mamdani’s team feel better if more Asian kids were disciplined?
This report will do nothing to enhance the social mobility prospects of African Americans and Hispanics, but it will increase racial polarization. Is that an accident? Or is it the desired result?
